David Bowie’s death on Sunday in New York transmitted the rarest of shocks, its announcement rudely waking those of us in the UK, disrupting sleep patterns across the US, and disorienting admirers the world over. After suffering a heart attack midway through the Reality tour in 2004, he had stepped back from public life: his last live performance, alongside Alicia Keys at the…

With David Letterman’s final Late Show airing on CBS on Wednesday, bringing a close to an unsurpassed thirty-three year career at the forefront of late night, the media over the past week has been full of all things Letterman. There have been tender and laudatory remarks and reminiscences from a whole host of celebrities and, most of all, from his…

Album of the Year Jolie Holland – Wine Dark Sea After the tightly drawn compositions of 2011’s Pint of Blood, Wine Dark Sea is no less composed, but its pieces rumble, scuzzy and searing, in wave upon wave with Holland’s voice cohering at the centre. Songs shift seamlessly between the genres of blues, jazz, folk, and soul. There’s thick feedback played through multiple…

Elvis Presley leers atop my list of the five best popular Christmas recordings. ‘Blue Christmas’, written in 1948 by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson, is ostensibly a rejoinder to ‘White Christmas’, with its lines ‘You’ll be doing all right, with your Christmas of white / But I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas’ – even though the Irving Berlin-penned song, first…

Feeling only moderately provoked but more to the point inspired by Pitchfork’s list of the 100 best albums of the decade so far, I have compiled and extensively written out this list of my own. My list forgoes EPs, otherwise works by Blood Diamonds and Holy Other would have made the cut, Zola Jesus would have been placed higher, and Burial…